Here's My Favorite E-Commerce Stock to Buy Now

E-commerce is a clear trend, and there are some excellent opportunities to invest in it. However, the best opportunities might be outside of the United States. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on July 2, Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, discusses why MercadoLibre (MELI -1.85%) is his favorite e-commerce play and how big he thinks the company can get as e-commerce adoption grows. 

Matt Frankel: I own the stock, I am a big believer in the stock. I think it could be not quite as big as Amazon (AMZN -1.53%), but close to it in time. Their growth is just absolutely phenomenal and this is what I was saying about Peloton (PTON -3.35%), how it's somewhat of a pandemic play and its unclear how much. When people are staying home, of course, businesses that ship goods to your house are going to look great. They grew their revenue over 100% year-over-year for four consecutive quarters, 158% year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter. That's compared to a quarter that was half pandemic, half not in the first quarter of 2020. Their marketplace business, which is considered the Amazon of Latin America, grew its gross merchandise volume by 114% in the first quarter year-over-year, and that was the less impressive part of their business. The fintech side of the business, Mercado Pago, which you could call the PayPal (PYPL 0.33%) of Latin America, grew 129%. They processed over $14 billion of payments last quarter. That's not quite like where Square (SQ -1.78%) is, but it's getting there. Square is, I think, around a $30 billion quarterly rate. Just to put those numbers in perspective, the numbers are really impressive and they are. MercadoLibre's marketplace volume is roughly 4% of that of Amazon, and their payment volume is roughly 6% of PayPal. You call them the Amazon and PayPal of Latin America, but it's like those, but it very earlier stages. Brazil is a big focus of theirs. It's still in the very early stages of e-commerce and fintech adoption compared to the United States. Big market opportunity, you're paying for it, it's not achieved stock by any metric. The fact that this value investor has it as one of his big holdings in his portfolio, should tell you a thing or two, there's a lot of potential here. They're not profitable yet, but that will come. Amazon just became profitable a couple of years ago, I believe, if I'm quoting that correctly. They were called the ultimate start-up for years and years because they were losing money in the name of growth, and we saw how that worked out for them. I think MercadoLibre could grow to many times its current size over the next decade or so.